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Online Editors and Readability Tools

In my Mobile and Social Media class on Monday, I gave a presentation about three different apps that help to optimize the best work out of any writer. The apps included the Hemingway app, After the Deadline, and the On-Page Optimization tool.

Hemingway App

The Hemingway app is a versatile online editor. In order to use it, a user will copy a paragraph and paste it into the website’s page. From there, the paragraph is analyzed by the website. The results appear in an instant and writers are free to view any mistakes marked by specific color coded highlights. Red means the sentence is too dense or complex to clearly understand; whereas a highlight in yellow is a long sentence and should be shortened. Adverbs are in blue and passive voice is marked with green. According to the Hemingway app, a correctly written sentence will have zero highlights. Writers will be free to then exchange their edited content to readers.

While the Hemingway app is a useful grammar checker, writers may have a difference of opinion with the edits the app highlights. For example, the app advises that strong verbs should edit into a simpler verb.

After The Deadline

After the Deadline, like the Hemingway app is an online editor. However, a writer does not have to copy and paste material into a website. The app downloaded through your web browser and connects to almost everything you write on the web. It currently edits content on all social media websites, Reddit and even WordPress. Though the name After the Deadline is slightly misleading, the app checks content before a reader publishes.

After the Deadline is not a replacement for carefully reading what you write. It is a safety net meant to capture common mistakes and bring them to your attention.

On-Page Optimization Tool

The On-Page Optimization Tool is a search engine optimization (SEO) network that lets you quickly see the important SEO content on your webpage URL the same way a search engine spider views your data.

As an SEO search engine, this app is made useful by those writers that create content and want that content to be seen by the maximum number of people. After a document is published, a writer can copy the URL into the website to find important keywords or “tags” that will attract attention to their story.

As for other uses, this app can also assert what an online news story is about through the most used keywords, before the story is ever read.